{"author":"Jalina Mhyana","author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana","total_quotes":21,"quotes":[{"text":"If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirtin her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs and open the lid when you visit.Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars melt and spiral into a halo over my head and I’ve stirred my death into the sky.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["ballerina","death","funeral-rites","last-rites","love","marriage","music","youth"],"id":4599,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,boulders, and caves where Kami nature spiritsminister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root, and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["farmers","gods","japan","nature","offerings","poetry","shintoism","spirits","still-lifes"],"id":18102,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people’s invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I’m even fooling myself.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["chronic-fatigue-syndrome","cure","depression","healing","invisible-illness"],"id":28842,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["blood","homelessness","hunger","love","marriage","memoir"],"id":41752,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"Every Sunday behind bibles, virgins,soldiers tight against me, longing,and my pelvis rubbing gods'to the big black woman voices.Soldiers tight against me, longing,all that rising, sitting, kneelingto the big black woman voices,spirits warming, tensing, folding, thenall that rising, sitting, kneelinglike some kind of dance, a mating,spirits warming, tensing, folding andgod went “Shhhhh” between my thighs –.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["church","god","gospel","love","marriage","military","spirits","truth"],"id":98467,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he’d place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["creative-visualization","dreams","drugs","hope","imagination","love","marriage","memoir","photography","romance","vision"],"id":119684,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"We could scan each car for terrorists  and lovers she could lean into my camouflage her head resting on woven trees. When they come for her body she could run deep  into my uniform into the forest of me  where they could never find her.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["compassion","escape","germany","magical-realism","military","poetry","prostitution","soldier","truth"],"id":186132,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"Everything was numbered: the lenses, the painterly sky, the milligrams of my panic pills. I had prescription eyes that allowed me to see better, and prescription panic pills that allowed me to play blind.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["anxiety-disorders","blindness","denial","medication","vision"],"id":188582,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I’m miming myself.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["city-life","exile","florence","imaginary-friend","italy","loneliness"],"id":218029,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"Veins of ivy scale stones,find footholds butthe caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won’ttopple like drunkson their moss-soft shadows.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["cemetery","death-and-dying","drunks","england","poetry"],"id":237314,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}